UpfrontPsychologist testifies about the dangers of solitary confinement

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take his feces and smearit all over his face.”Graves, who wasexonerated in 2010, saidhe still feels the effectsof the decade spent insolitary confinement.“I haven’t had a goodnight sleep since myrelease,” he said. “I havemood swings that causeemotional breakdowns.”Such long-term effectsare common, Haneysaid. “One of the veryserious psychologicalconsequences of solitaryconfinement is that itrenders many peopleincapable of livinganywhere else.” Then,when prisoners arereleased into cells or backinto society, they are oftenoverwhelmed with anxiety.“They actually get to thepoint where they becomefrightened of other humanbeings,” he said.

The nation’s roughly

80,000 inmates in
solitary confinement
are “at grave risk of
psychological harm,”
Craig Haney, PhD, APA
member and professor of
psychology at University
of California, Santa Cruz,
told the Senate Judiciary
Subcommittee on the
Constitution, Civil Rights
and Human Rights. “The
conditions of confinement
are far too severe to serve
any kind of penological
purpose,” he said.

Haney, who was
appointed this year to
a National Academy
of Sciences committee
studying the causes and
consequences of high
rates of incarceration in
the United States, has
interviewed hundreds of
prison staff and inmates
and toured and inspected
dozens of U.S. prisons.

At a June 19 hearing, he showed pictures to illustrate
solitary confinement’s harsh conditions, including
filthy cells that are “scarcely larger than a king-sized
bed,” he said. As a result of the endless monotony
and lack of human contact, “for some prisoners ...
solitary confinement precipitates a descent into
madness.” Many inmates experience panic
attacks, depression and paranoia, and some
suffer hallucinations, he said.

Former inmate Anthony Graves, who spent
18 years on death row, including 10 in solitary
confinement for a murder he didn’t commit,
drove home Hanley’s points. “I would watch
guys come to prison totally sane, and in three
years they don’t live in the real world anymore,”
he said. One fellow inmate, Graves said, “would
go out into the recreation yard, get naked, lie
down and urinate all over himself. He would

Roughly 80,000 inmates live alone in cells not much larger
than a king-sized bed.

—SADIE DINGFELDER

Read more about the mental health effects of solitary confinementin the May Monitor.